My natural response is just to figure that any specific thing in the EU is canon until
actually contradicted by one of the movies, and even if it isn't canon it's still a "could-have-happened" that serves to illustrates the limits of the technologically possible... unless statements about the technology are contradicted by the movies.
I.e. one of the Thrawn books has the big blue guy bolting cloaking devices to asteroids and putting them in orbit around Alliance-held Coruscant as a sort of minefield. It may be that events in the new movies contradict this story (say, because they're set thirty years after the original trilogy and portray the rebels as
never having taken Coruscant, or because they portray Thrawn as having never lived). But I'd still assume that it would be physically possible in Star Wars to cloak asteroids and use them as a sort of minefield; just because Thrawn never did it doesn't mean no one else could have.
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On the original topic, one point some people may be overlooking: to starve out a populated place, you
don't have to make it physically impossible to get ships to that place. Take as an example WWII Britain, which was having its supplies strangled by German U-boats and other measures directed against its sea commerce.
There was never any danger of the Germans somehow physically closing the sea to British ships, as though a wall had been built around the island. Nor was there any imminent danger of the Germans somehow sinking
all the British ships. And while the Germans did bomb and strafe and harass British ports, they never made it physically impossible for the British ships to dock and unload supplies.
BUT-
The need to protect the British freighters against the U-boats meant that the freighters had to follow evasive routes across the ocean, and had to stick together in large convoys for mutual protection. Waiting around for the convoy and evading known German submarine operations both slowed the freighters down. Slowing the freighters down means they can only make three round trips in the time it'd normally take them to make four, or two instead of three. Which means less supplies to Britain, which could theoretically cause starvation if it got bad enough.
Likewise, sinking
some of the British ships meant that Britain could not solve the problem by building more ships- if each ship takes twice as long to make a round trip, building twice as many ships lets you keep importing the same amount of goods, but you can't do that if people sink your ships as fast as you can build them.
And finally, bombing and laying minefields in and around British ports meant that it took
more time to unload a ship, because equipment for unloading things would get damaged, because ships had to pick their way carefully around the mines, and because workers were being harassed by bombs. Again, delays in unloading a ship mean each ship makes fewer round trips a year, which means less goods are imported.
So even though in theory, British freighters could "just sail around" the German submarines, and most of them were getting through just fine, and the British ports were still in operation despite all the mines and stuff... it was a hard economic time. And if it hadn't been for various factors (like good planning, the British having a large margin for error due to imports of goods other than food), then
yes the British Isles might conceivably have faced starvation.
So it may be that Coruscant is dependent on such a great mass of food imports that even
slowing down and disrupting the flow of trading vessels to Coruscant can cause them to starve.
dworkin wrote:Perhaps you should check that questionable source, Star Wars IV: A New Hope.
Someone cooler than you wrote:Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it.
Han feels being fired upon by Imperial Star Destroyers was safer than making an incautious jump. This is the viewpoint of the archetypical rogue and risk taker. Imagine what a more conservative pilot carrying a bazillion credits of cargo thinks.
Well, that was seemingly about using the navigation computer to properly analyze the route ahead of them- still, it does tend to suggest that hyperspace travel can be hazardous in the extreme if not done 'properly.'